


blind eyes could blaze like meteors

by notdarthvader



Series: variations on a shepard hymn [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Destroy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Implied Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 08:03:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13922874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notdarthvader/pseuds/notdarthvader
Summary: Shepard was born with the white-hot heat of anger burning beneath her skin.Shepard was born fighting.





	blind eyes could blaze like meteors

**Author's Note:**

> title and bits of the story and Shep's tattoo taken from Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.
> 
> A character study on shepard and anger. And tattoos.

She is young and dumb, blind anger beating through her veins with every breath when she gets the tattoo.

A little too hazy on the side of drunk, the quiet anger of being an orphan and selling her soul to the war machine stirring beneath her skin. She’s strong and sturdy now, but she’s no soldier yet. And tonight’s her last night on Earth before she ships off to join the Alliance, right and properly.

The woman who runs the corner store tattoo parlor had taken her in, and nodded at the credits that Shepard had transferred, and ushered her to lay on her stomach at a bench.

“What are you giving me,” Shepard slurs out, her words tangling on her tongue.

The woman smiles, and there is something like sorrow in the crows feet around her eyes. “A promise.”

* * *

 

She doesn’t remember the tattoo until she’s showering and one of her fellow recruits gasps when she turns around. “Holy shit, you have a tattoo.”

Shepard freezes. “I what?”

* * *

 

The words are written in delicate cursive, looping soft and slow, like lace up the line of her spine. The words end, trailing into thin vertical lines, the outlines of planets and stars and moons etched over and between the lines. Some of the lines nearly vanish into her skin as she traces the outline with her eyes, craning her neck to make out the words along her spine.

“ _Do not go gentle into that good night,_ ” she whispers, and remembers the way the tattoo artist’s eyes looked sad, sad, sad.

Outside the station, the stars drift, silent and stifling.

* * *

 

She spends the entire next day holed up in her quarters, carefully committing the entire poem to her mind.

She reads, and reads, and rereads, and reads again each poem. She whispers the words to herself like a promise over and over and over. The whole time, she’s furious.

Furious at herself for being dumb drunk enough to get a tattoo from some tattoo parlor she’d never been to. She’s angry with the tattoo artist for giving her the words she did, and she’s mad at her parents for being dumb enough to get killed in action. She’s angry that she’s going to be a military brat and live and die for the Alliance, just like her parents did, and she’s angry that life didn’t really give her much of a fucking choice.

 _Old age should burn and rave at the close of day_ , she whispers to herself, as her muscles ache and hiss from the day’s training, as exhaustion fights with her eyelids. _Rage_.

 _Rage, against the dying of the light_.

* * *

 

The beacon ignites and she sees war, death, sacrifice. A horrific future that rings with a finality that she can feel echoing in her soul.

The Council doesn’t listen when she tells them about Saren, and she’s not sure why she’s so surprised.

War, death, sacrifice.

 _Bureaucracy and corruption never care for the evils of war if it means a profit can be turned_ , she thinks, and ignores the way her blood simmers at the thought.

* * *

 

Despite it all, she spins together a little crew and makes a few friends, and they kill a few people and do a few good things for the galaxy.

And it’s-

Well, it’s not necessarily okay. War, death, sacrifice whispers against the back of her skull constantly, the seeping visions from the beacon hissing in her nightmares.

But her crew, her _friends_ smile at her, tired but content over coffee in the mornings, and they have a ship, and they’re doing things.

Helping.

She wrestles with Wrex in the cargo hold before breakfast in the mornings, and it’s always worth it to see his eyes widen in approval, just so, when she hauls him overhead, using the momentum of his own charge against him. She can feel the changes in her body the more she works out and spars with him, feel her shoulders firming, and see the corded muscles etch themselves in the lines of her thighs.

As she grows stronger, Wrex stops going so easy on her, and that there is enough to piss her off that he was ever going easy on her in the first place, and so the competition is on.

The rest of them are still a little stiff on formalities, awkward and unused to the casual air in which she interacts with them.

That’s not to say she doesn’t know how to command. The moment they leave the ship, the steel of command settles into her spine and she walks with a power and authority that makes people _move_. But within the walls of the Normandy, she’s sometimes _just_ Joslyn. Not Commander Shepard.

Eventually Ashley relaxes around her, and then Tali does, and then Liara and Garrus. Kaiden remains stiff most days, but _that’s just the stick up his ass_ Liara whispers over breakfast.

Shepard laughs, they all laugh. She thinks maybe this is something she could get used to.

* * *

 

Garrus joins her and Wrex for sparing sessions.

She relishes the look on his face the first time he lunges for her, predator fast, and she simply grabs on the collar of his armor, and drops low, letting her body channel his momentum down, sliding one foot along to ground to ease her fall, the other coming up to rest on his stomach. Then, the second she’s low enough, she kicks.

And he goes flying over her head, landing square on his back with a surprised, and slightly pained grunt.

She’s on her feet before he can do anything, straddling him and moving in for the chokehold.

Garrus stares. Wrex laughs.

Shepard pulls him to his feet and grins up at him, and it’s a whole new kind of victory when he grins back.

* * *

 

Then Virmire happens.

The ship is quiet, and Ashley is gone.

Shepard sits in her room, her knees pulled up to her chest, her long hair wet from the shower and spilling in loose waves down her back and around her arms like a curtain.

There is sadness, yes. But her hands shake, and shake and shake with anger as she watches the stars outside the Normandy glimmer.

“ _Though wise men at their end know dark is right,_ ” she whispers, her voice trembling under the heat of the rage that sears through her veins. “ _Because their words had forked no lightning they_ ,” her words fail as her voice gives out, and her hands shake and shake and shake.

If she looks hard enough, she can see the ink of Ashley’s hair against the midnight dark of space.

* * *

 

Joker yells for her from the escape pod, desperate and terrified, and she never looks away from him as she slams down on the release.

“ _Do not go gentle into that good night,_ ” she breathes out, choking around the anger clogging in her lungs.

There is heat, and light, and she is thrown into the abyss of the stars.

* * *

 

Alchera spins beneath her, a pale blur against the fogged visor of her helmet. The air hisses, slips from her suit, and oxygen is a faint rasp in her throat, and all she can feel is fury boiling in her veins.

The silhouette of the enemy ship hangs against the backdrop of the stars, and she _hates_ them.

Falling freely from space, the last noise that Shepard makes is not a whimper.

It is the broken, furious roar of a wounded, dying animal.

* * *

 

Then her body is breaking through the icy atmosphere, and there is only silence.

* * *

 

She wakes with a blurred start, the dim silhouettes of people moving in the edges of her vision and the first thing she does is move her weakened body to lunge for their throats. They up the dosage, and she is lost beneath the haze of the drugs again.

She makes a snarling, choked-off noise, and watches something like shock cross a woman’s face.

And then there is silence again.

* * *

 

She wakes to a woman’s voice barking orders in her ears, and she’s moving, stumbling into her armor and cursing under her breath.

* * *

 

Cerberus, she learns. _And ain’t that fucking something_ , she snarls under her breath.

But she takes it.

Deals with it.

Bites down on her tongue and her anger.

When she learns that they didn’t repair her tattoo with the rest of her, she leaves, taking a shuttle to Earth. She wanders the desolate back streets from her childhood, drinking, Cerberus’ upgrades too good to let her get properly drunk. Fate must have it out for her, because in some twist of events, some strange coincidence, she ends up back on the corner store tattoo parlor, and the woman, with her greying hair and tired eyes looks at her sadly.

“Fix it,” Shepard says. Then, swallowing down the bitter taste of anger and pride in her mouth. “Please. I’ll- any amount of credits you want. It’s- It’s a good promise to keep.”

The woman smiles, a melancholy, aching thing, and gesture to the bed, and Shepard lays chest-down, something like relief fluttering behind her ribs.

* * *

 

Her fresh tattoo burns a promise on her back the entire time she’s walking through Afterlife to meet with Aria.

This time, it feels like a promise she chose. One that she wants to keep.

* * *

 

“You better hurry,” Aria says, and her eyes say that she _knows_ something. “Archangel doesn’t have much time.”

There’s enough smugness in her voice, in her eyes, and Shepard is tempted to fight her right there and then, but that’s an issue for another day.

“C’mon,” she snaps to Miranda and Jacob. “We better go.”

* * *

 

Archangel lands a concussive round right in her armor.

A concussive round.

She loads a clip into her pistol, and feels the biotics ripple with power, flowing like letters up her spine. “ _Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright_ ,” she whispers to herself, ignoring the strange looks Miranda and Jacob give her.

She lights up her biotics and launches herself into the fray, can’t fight down the grin or the hot rush of satisfaction as the mercenaries cry out in fear around her. She guns them down, throwing them off the bridge or landing bullets between their eyes, Miranda and Jacob laying down cover fire behind her, Archangel following in their stead after a moment’s hesitation.

* * *

 

“Shepard,” Garrus says. His voice is weary, and he looks _tired_ , exhausted in a way she’s never seen him. But still, it’s _Garrus_.

“Garrus,” she replies, grinning. “Looks like you’re in a bit of a bad situation.”

He shoots her a look, and for however strung out and worn-down he is, there’s a spark that lights in his eyes at that. “Actually, I was just enjoying myself a bit of target practice.”

“Target practice? Is that what you call missing the mercs and hitting the friendlies?” she teases, folding her arms over her chest.

And finally, _fucking finally,_ he cracks a smile back at her at that. “That’s called friendly encouragement to hurry the fuck up, Shepard.”

For a moment, they grin at each other, the weight of the past two years easing.

But then his face hardens, and she straightens, and they fall right back to business.

* * *

 

The gunship fires, and Garrus falls.

The sheer rush of fury lights up her biotics in a way that she didn’t know it could, and she’s throwing herself out the window, and straight through the window of the cockpit.

* * *

 

He survives, and they share a joke and a smile.

The scars suit him, she thinks, and she tells him as much. He smiles, a little lopsided now, and tells her that her scars suit her just fine, too.

And well.

That’s that.

* * *

 

The Collectors take the crew, and the uneasy red light of the Omega Four relay is only two hours away.

She breathes in, and watches the stars pass in silence.

Garrus slips in the door. “I brought alcohol,” he says softly.

She pats the ground beside her, and he sits with her, and for a while, they are silent.

“Did you know, I have a tattoo?” she asks, her voice hushed in the still of the cabin, the still of space.

Garrus breathes. “No. I didn’t.”

She looks over at him, something like humor lighting in her expression. “Want to see it?”

He grins back.

They’re both tired, and they’re about to look death in the eye, face oblivion with no guarantee of coming back. But he smiles for her like they’re not two war-ravaged soldiers, two beaten and bloodied pawns in a war that will be bigger than either of them could ever imagine.

He smiles at her like maybe, for these two hours, it’s just the two of them that exist in the world.

And so.

And so, she smiles back, and watches with something akin to smugness as he reverently traces the powerful line of her shoulders with his eyes as she pulls her tanktop over her head.

He is strong, corded, predatory power, and she is a dreadnought pulled into human skin, fury made into flesh.

And somehow, they make it work. Two jagged edges of a glass fitting together neat, and beautiful.

“ _Rage,_ ” he whispers against her shoulders, as he traces her tattoo with his tongue, and listens to her hiss out curses and gasp under his touch. “ _Rage, against the dying of the light_.”

* * *

 

The Alliance and duty tear them apart. The Reapers descend on Palaven, and Garrus is called back to defend his home, and Shepard is locked in her own house for six months.

She spends the whole time working out, hitting the punching bag in her basement, and learning the words to her tattoo in every language she can.

She learns to speak her poem in all four main Asari dialects, and two dominant Krogan dialects. She learns the words in Greek, Korean, Gaelic and more. She learns standardized Quarian, and a few common drell languages. She learns the Palaven dialect of Turian, and can’t help the dizzying grin that comes with being able to force her halting words and voice into the shape of _rage, rage, **rage**_.

She learns to cook a few things, and gets _really_ good at making ramen. She soft-boils her eggs, cooks the ramen in the broth, fries jalapeños and mushrooms and chops up tomatoes and spinach to add to the top. It’s _good_. She perfects that, then works to branch out, coming back to treat herself when burning noodles for the fourth time that week discourages her.

She works out more, and more, and works on knocking her punching bag loose in less than ten hits, remembering the gleam of approval in Wrex’s eye every time she landed a solid hit.

Her poem becomes a mantra, a banner, a declaration she whispers to herself as she falls asleep slumped over a book, or when she passes out from exhaustion on her basement floor, weights littering the floor around her. She drinks her coffee in the morning, practices cooking pancakes, and then loses herself in the steady thrum of her fists connecting with the bag.

She builds her anger around her like a forge, and lets herself be melted into steel.

* * *

 

Then, the Reapers hit Earth, and Anderson reinstates her.

“We need you,” he says, and the words on her spine burn.

* * *

 

She’s about to show the turian being particularly stubborn just how she earned the respect of the krogan, when an all too familiar voice rumbles _I’m on it, Shepard_ , and her heart maybe skips a beat or maybe two, and she can’t help the curling smile that pulls at her lips.

* * *

 

“I didn’t know if you even still felt the same way about me,” he says, his voice almost soft.

She almost laughs, at that. “Garrus,” she says, more gently that she can remember herself being. “Garrus.” A promise, a cadence.

He stops his worried rambling and looks at her, really looks at her. “Shepard,” he says back, after a long pause.

She laughs, then, and pulls him down for a kiss.

* * *

 

“ _Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,_ ” she whispers against Garrus’ skin. Overhead, the stars wink down at them. Her fingers are feather light against his jaw, her sea-green eyes distant as she gently catalogues the veritable constellations of scars woven into his body. “ _And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way._ ”

She pauses, and catches his gaze, her thumb tracing over his mouth. “ _Do not go gentle into that good night_.”

He can feel the notches of her spine where the words are written in delicate cursive. A promise, a blessing, an oath.

“Wise words to live by,” he says then, and she huffs a laugh.

“I’ve only ever known how to be angry,” she whispers back, like it’s a secret.

He laughs, then. “I know. Wrex and I used to argue over whether or not you were more like krogans or turians because of it.”

She huffs again and shakes her head, her long mane of hair falling like waves down her shoulders and across her broad, powerful back. He can’t help breathing out reverent curses as he watches the smooth ripple of her body, the powerful cut of her shoulders and arms tapering into the lean, tight flat of her stomach, the catch of her hipbones, and the thick, steady weight of her thighs. “I’m human. I think we have more emotional capacity than the rest of you all sometimes. We have a lot of feelings.”

“You might be human,” he says softly, his tongue heavy, thick in his mouth. “but _damn_ if you don’t put turians to shame.”

She stares at him, baffled, before collapsing over him, giggling helplessly. “Does _my fringe_ look particularly appealing today, Mr. Vakarian?”

“You always look appealing, Commander Shepard,” he teases back. “But Spirits above, your waist and shoulders could kill a guy. I’d probably thank you for it, if you did,” he amends and pauses, considering. “Actually, if your thighs could snap my neck, I would-“

She cuts him off with a kiss, the sweet plush of her lips yielding soft against his mouth. His hands close around her thighs, and the way her muscles tense and roil beneath his fingers sends shudders up his spine. She grins at him, bright, and mischievous. “You said something about my thighs, did you now?”

His fingers spasm against the might of her thighs, and her grin turns sinful. She pins his shoulders to the mattress and moves to straddle his face in one fluid movement. “Put your money where your mouth is, Garrus.”

He breathes out, ragged, and helpless to deny her this, deny her anything. “Gladly,” he rasps, and then his mouth is otherwise occupied, and all he thinks of for the rests of the night is the way she gasps his name.

* * *

 

She says her words in all their languages, whenever they are around. She repeats them as they rocket through danger, stagger through mission after mission.

Her promise, her word, her bond to them all.

It starts, though, with Vega first, half asleep in the morning, hunched over a coffee mug. “ _No entres dócilmente en esa noche quieta,_ ” he murmurs to himself. “ _La vejez debería delirar y arder cuanda se cierra el día._ ”

Shepard sits down across from him, her mug wrapped gently in her hands, a sad, half-smile on her face.

“ _Rabia, rabia, contra la agonía de la luz,_ ” she whispers back, and his eyes open with a start, before he smiles at her. Real, genuine. The slow sort of smile like the sun cresting the horizon at dawn.

“Yeah,” he says, “yeah.”

* * *

 

“I love you,” she breathes out, and for a moment, despite the gunfire, despite the tanks exploding and the debris raining down on them, all he can hear is the soft, aching sadness in her voice, the way his heart beats unsteady, his blood loud in his own ears.

“I… love you, too,” he rasps, his broken voice a betrayal.

She stares at him, beautiful, terrible, and bloodied. Then she’s taking a step back, and another, her eyes never leaving his. “ _Go_ ,” she shouts, her voice cracking. She looks back one more time, before squaring her shoulders and charging back into the fray.

He doesn’t, can’t look away as the Normandy falls away, her figure blurring in the ash and smoke and dust that rains around them. “ _Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight,_ ” he whispers to no one in particular, even as Tali stiffens where she’s holding him up.

The Reapers light up again, the night sky blazing the red of a dying sun.

“ _Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay._ ” Tali whispers too. Despite the gunfire, the explosions rocking the ship, there is something heavy and quiet in the Normandy, a sullen hush that wasn’t quite there before.

 _Rage_ , he thinks as Shepard disappears into chaos. _Rage, against the dying of the light._

* * *

 

He doesn’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse that her whole crew wears her words in their hearts like she wears hers on her spine.

* * *

 

They crash on a nowhere planet in the middle of nowhere. EDI falls silent, and their tech goes offline in one fell swoop.

Devastating, he thinks, is a good word for it.

“ _And you, my father, there on the sad height_ ,” Joker breathes out, a prayer only for himself where he’s crouched, huddled up by the fire.

He watches the stars pass overhead, the moon hanging heavy and low against the lush horizon.

 _Rage_ , he thinks, and his hands curl into fists.

They have survived worse.

And they will survive this, too.

Shepard’s words are their promise, now.

* * *

 

The Alliance finds them, several months later, and they are all too weary, too tired, too desperate for their Commander to feel much of anything other than anxiety.

“She’s asleep. She’s been comatose since we found her, four months ago.”

He squares his jaw, and the rest of them stand firm.

* * *

 

 _Rage,_ the Normandy’s crew has been taught. _Rage._

* * *

 

Her fingers tighten around his in the hospital bay, a twitch of life, and then her eyes are opening, hazy, and sea-green.

“ _Shepard_ ,” he breathes out, ragged and desperate.

She tilts her head to look at him, and blinks a few times, before the corner of her lips curls up just so. “ _Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,”_ she whispers, her voice parched, cracking in time with her lips and with the weight of her resolve. “ _Do not go gentle into that good night._ ”

He covers her hand with both of his and leans forward so their foreheads are pressed together, gentle. So, so, achingly gentle. “ _Rage,_ ” he whispers, a promise, a vow, the weight of her struggles and the burden of her choices. “ _rage against the dying of the light_.”

**Author's Note:**

> A study on anger and Shepard. I feel like the moments that Shepard shows anger or hate are weirdly quiet or muted, and I wanted to do a sort of character exploration on living with that sort of burning anger beneath your skin, at your own circumstances, at injustice, at the way the world turns. I don’t know. I felt like she was often too quick to just accept things instead of being angry about it. I wanted to see if I could make anger a productive, fueling thing, and then do a sort of poetic inversion about it.
> 
> Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas’ famous poem, is beseeching his dying father for resigning himself to a quiet death. I felt like it was a good way to illustrate the frustration I felt with Shepard for being so quick to offer herself up as a sacrificial lamb for the Alliance. And while she did it for the good of people, sure, I think I wanted her to have more anger about it, be more conflicted, and more willing to keep fighting through it rather than just accept that she was going to die.
> 
> Anyways the throw shepard uses on garrus and wrex is tomoe nage, the circle throw. It’s a judo move, and I’m a small guy. I weight about 120lbs, and I’ve thrown guys twice my size with that one. It’s absolutely one of my favorite throws and I absolutely believe that Shepard knows some kind of martial arts. I like to think my shep learned martial arts just to have an edge on wrex and all his ribbing.


End file.
